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For the past bit I’ve been working in Windows, since I’m more familiar with Visual Studio… but I’m getting the Linux build caught up right now, chaiscript and MyGUI work just fine (had to statically link MyGUI since I couldn’t get the shared library to load properly, for whatever reason), and the character controller and physX are working perfectly. I am however having issues with the timing system… so everything is pretty much in slowmo… but it shouldn’t be too tough of a fix…

So, progress is slower than I’d like, thanks to school and whatnot (I have both college and high school classes and a really messed up schedule), but I’ve had a fair bit of time to work for the past day or two.

The new engine is coming together, I have the character controller from the original engine running (and I have a test setup with gravity changing and player control and a few other bits working). The logic/gameobject system is mostly set up, as are a bunch of other random pieces.

I’m working with the scripting right now, I had originally decided on lua, but Shua, from the Pseudoform project, suggested ChaiScript in the comments earlier today, and after looking at it and running through a few tests, it seems a lot nicer than lua/luabind. It’s built entirely as a language for use with C++, and seems a lot more straightforward than the other languages that I’ve looked at. I think performance-wise it’s probably not as good as lua or some of the alternatives, but it’s still a young project and I’m sure it’ll evolve and improve. Luckily, I haven’t done much with lua yet, so I’m going to try to get ChaiScript setup in the engine over the next couple hours and see how it all works.

So, still working on the new version. I’m planning a lot of changes, but I’ll wait until I have something to show before explaining stuff too much.

So in development/Linux news, Arch Linux flat out didn’t work with PhysX, I have no idea why exactly (I got errors about the shared library being in the wrong format). I really don’t know Linux well enough to guess why this didn’t work, but I guess there must be some difference in the binary formats between Arch and other distros (the PhysX packages were marked rpm or debian, but there was a PhysX pack on the AUR that used the rpm one… and it gave me the same error).

So I put Ubuntu onto a 25gb partition and got everything set up, and it compiled, but the physics doesn’t seem to actually be working (if I create an empty scene with one box and high gravity, the box doesn’t move, the same code in Windows works just fine… I’m hoping it’s just some scene setting or default in the Linux version that I’m overlooking…). And as an added bonus GDB refuses to work in Ubuntu/Codeblocks right now…

In other news I got feedback from the IGF judges and it confirmed a lot of my suspicions and got me thinking on some areas to improve. I might post the feedback up here later on.

UPDATE: Got PhysX running in Ubuntu (turns out it was a little quirk with the Linux version, where if you don’t explicitly disable fluids, it won’t simulate anything), still annoyed I can’t use Arch for developing (in the couple weeks I’ve had it I’ve really really begun to like it… ah well I can still use it for 3d modeling and everything else….). Also, after experimenting with python a bit, I think I’m going to stick with lua for the moment, so after I get lua/luabind set up in ubuntu I can start back on actual coding…

Well, may as well release this now, I’m in need of some feedback, keep in mind that the system reqs are rather steep, this is a VERY early version, and I am in the process of rewriting the engine, reworking the art style etc, the readme should include all the info you need, if you have any questions/issues/suggestions/etc feel free to post them here or email me at quantasupport@ REMOVESPAMgmail.com

So, Quanta didn’t make the cut in the IGF (congrats to the finalists and everyone who entered!). I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit disappointed, but looking through the first page of entries was enough to tell that I didn’t stand much of a chance, at least the feedback from the judges should be helpful. Now, knowing that the IGF is out of the way, I’m going to be reimagining/reworking things a bit.

In the version I submitted to the IGF, I really focused way too much on technical junk, and I sort of over extended myself on the art side of things, the realistic industrial look is rather hard on the assets and shader end of things (and it still wound up looking rather dated) as well as not being very distinctive/interesting. This also forced the system requirements way higher that I’d have liked. So for this new ‘version’ or ‘iteration’ or whatever you’d call it, I’m going to go for a simpler, more distinctive art style; something that will look nice, but be simpler and actually reasonable on the asset creation end of things. I have some ideas as to how it’ll look, and I’ll post some screen for some feedback when i get something working.

Gameplay-wise, I’m waiting to hear feedback from the IGF judges and from whoever downloads it when I publicly release the build (I’m debating just uploading it tonight… I’ve gotta add some legal disclaimer stuff though… but soon anyways). But I definitely want to focus a bit more on the learning/difficulty curve and such, and actually do some playtesting, etc.

As far as technology goes, as I mentioned before I am rewriting the engine from scratch (but using the old for reference so, having done most everything once before, it should be fairly rapid development), I’m likely (not 100% positive, but pretty darn close) going to make it open source, if mainly to force me to write cleaner code. I was originally looking to do a lot of multithreading stuff, but after a month of stumbling around with that, it’s not worth the effort, I will use threading (for instance, I might run the audio system in it’s own thread, or divide up some of the internal stuff into threads) but not in the original way I was looking to. I will try to leave the new engine open for networking stuff, but that’s a bit less of a priority right now. I am going to be using a scripting language, at the moment I’ve got some very limited lua stuff functional, but I’ve had python suggested to me by a few people and might give that a shot, as boost.python looks a bit nicer to work with than luabind. Also, I am making every effort to make it work on Linux, since I’ve recently been using Linux a lot (tried ubuntu first, and now I’m running Arch Linux).

Overall, I’m hoping to make fairly regular releases (once I get the new engine far enough along to have something resembling a game, so a few months off yet..) and to be more open and out there a bit more. I’ve been sort of protective/quiet with Quanta up to now (think I’ve posted about it on two forums… and that’s about the extent of my PR work, to all 2 of the people reading this thanks for the interest!).

Alright, so I’m still working on the engine rewrite (at this point I’m knee-deep in threading stuff…), at this point I’m leaning closer to making it open source (I’ve started keeping a much more consistent coding style and using doxygen for generating documentation). I’ll post some info/screens/etc once I get something interesting working.

On another note, I recently decided to go for the student deal on Windows 7, I got the Professional version in 64bit. I honestly wasn’t impressed (not much different from Vista, lots of little tiny issues that kept forcing me to reboot). I actually decided to dual boot ubuntu all of an hour after installing 7, and I actually really like it (I’m way too used to Visual Studio to do much serious coding work in linux, but for 3d modeling and stuff I love it), a Linux version of Quanta is a definite possibility now.

Also, it looks like the finalists for the IGF will be announced on January 4th, so I’m crossing my fingers (still not exceedingly optimistic, but it would be amazing if Quanta made it…).

So, finishing my final paper/final thing for the quarter right now, I should be able to focus on Quanta a bit more now…

I’m planning on taking part in this weekend’s Ludum Dare (48hr game making compo), and I’m going to use what I have of Quanta’s new engine so far (basically I’m just going to hack it into a physics wrapper and stuff for now, but it’ll be a good opportunity to test out the threading stuff and perhaps some of the scripting system).

Also, I’m planning on releasing the IGF build of Quanta in mid January (the 15th is my goal). The build is now a month old, and it’s not oh so efficient; but it should be a good way to get some feedback with the puzzle design and general mechanics/controls/etc.

That was one interesting week, I think I got about 2 nights of sleep that whole week… random bugs kept popping up, midterms, my computer got a worm… but it’s over and I made the IGF deadline. So after sleeping for about 2 days straight I put together a new trailer:

I’ll see if I can get the IGF folks to put this up on Quanta’s entry page, I didn’t have a recent enough video when I submitted it, and the screenshot I gave them is pretty awful…